“The winner of last year, Cecilia Moisio, presented the result of her prize of the Dutch Dance Festival , which will go on tour this fall. Mum’s The Word is a cry for mother love and an expression of daughter obsession in a manic choreographed female quartet for three generations. Obsessive and unambiguous, but very original and sharp with a clever video montage of women in labor.”

5.10.2015 De Limburger – Ruud Maas

‘During this performance there is hard laughing, terrible crying and enormous shouting. Four women, between 18 and 75 years, show that the relationship between a mother and her daughter is often loving, but can also be highly flammable.’

‘In a pristine white room – which constantly surprises with projections – in one hour rages a solid war.’

Branco Popovic

‘The winner of the Dutch Dance Festival Maastricht Award 2014, Cecilia Moisio, premiered her piece ‘Mum’s the Word’ with a performance that perhaps divided the audience the most. ‘Mum’s the Word’ demonstrates how people wrestle with their emotional inheritance and feelings of shame which are passed on from generation to generation. As a member of the jury I was very excited to see the result of the pitch project. Even though not perfect in all senses ‘Mum’s the Word’ was one of the highlights of the festival, pushing boundaries of contemporary dance through a more narrative approach. Staged in a very well done decor and projections and performed by four expressive dancers ‘Mum’s the Word’ is a promising development of a Cecilia’s career.’

“L.O.V.E. was made for me and you” Frank Sinatra already sang decades ago. This surely counts for choreographer Cecilia Moisio’s performance L.O.V.E..
During the opening of ITs, an international festival for young graduated stage talent, Moisio presents a performance that combines song, dance and acting. Inspired by sweet love songs, Moisio has made a performance about love, which does not always turn out to be sweet.
Love, what is it anyway? Film romanticism seems to be the most likely answer for the six dancers on stage. To the tune of Sinatra’s song ‘L.O.V.E.’, they represent a supposed ideal side of life, where couples are kissing and talking in the park. But, although ‘L.O.V.E.’ seems to be a simple song, after analysing in greater detail it doesn’t seem that simple at all. The dancers show different emotions evoked in them by the song. Anger, desire and euphoria alternate each other in a high pace. Passion is never far away.

Cry for love
Six people make every inch of their body speak in a cry for love. They try to understand it, but it is hard. Making up theories behind love doesn’t seem to give them satisfaction. Love can’t be captured with science, the dancers’ paradoxical and heavy emotions confirm.

These feelings are visually translated into aggressive, wild or just quiet movements. One moment the dancers run at each other, the next one they serenely stand next to each other. For Moisio dance is not a goal, but an instrument for telling something. Nevertheless text is indispensable in Moisio’s production: the words “I love you” are regularly screamed out loud, which underlines the essence of L.O.V.E.

Renewing a default theme Love is a default theme. You will find it in almost every film, book, or theatre show. A performance with only love its theme is innovative. Moisio shows us the well-known film romanticism, but also shows love’s ugly face, and the many forms it can adopt. She shows the generality of the theme by putting in the limelight the different emotions that love provokes.

It is astonishing how little is needed to depict love. Moisio understands how she can touch love at the core by using numerous detours like extreme emotions and sweet love songs. This short performance of L.O.V.E. leaves us longing for more. Luckily a longer version is opening in October.

3.6.2014 Anette Embrechts – Volkskrant

‘…Impressive was the dance premiere of choreographer Cecilia Moisio’s L.O.V.E., with two dancers and four students. Like really tense rubbers they repeatedly bounced up after they pathetically lost themselves in excessive passion and dire lovesickness. But, as it turned out, falling in love isn’t yet L.O.V.E. This is just like the real development of this graduating stage talent that still has to commence in this huge world outside the Openluchttheater (open air theatre) where talent development has suffered a lot from governmental austerity measures. Maybe this is something else that should be turned around.’

This time we were transported to the present through a series of clicks and glitches. From there we were instructed on the etiquette of staying in our place. Through a series of interactions from cheesecake to the present, we travel in and out of air heads and modern thinkers.

Extremely well thought out and expertly performed, they literally had me in tears of laughter. If they are anywhere near you, you have to see this.

I know even I sometimes think I just can’t watch another piece about the role of women right now, but this one is brilliant!’

PIN-UPS TO FEMINAZIS: A UNIQUE PORTRAYAL OF THE CONTEMPORARY LIVED FEMALE EXPERIENCE

There are certain questions that have constantly haunted me throughout my experience in theatre; when did we displace female bodies outside of expected narratives? Can we subvert the molasses assertion of an essential, naturalized female identity by unpacking the performativity of gender within a performance? What happens when we liberate the female voice from gendered expectations and instead place her firmly within a world of spontaneity and the unpredictability of live action?

I’ve never seen those questions acknowledged more viscerally than I have at Dansmakers Amsterdam’s Juxtapose. The show is a beautiful whirlwind of two women aggressively ─ and unapologetically ─ taking up performative space. From the very beginning, choreographer Cecilia Moisio and fellow performer Katarzyna Sitarz employ alienating tactics. They make the aura of a gendered performativity palpably clear as we watch these two 50s-housewife-esque women, full of poise ─ and a naive belief in the system that suppresses them ─ slowly degenerate over the hour-long piece into grotesque, screaming, almost hysterical figures who dangerously throw themselves into the air. They defile baked goods, wield signs, and yell at the audience ─ bringing to life prejudiced clichés of the ‘angry feminist’ or ‘feminazi’. The piece ends with a striking (if not sombre) image of the two women, clad only in black panties and nipple tassels, jumping up and down tirelessly in silence, exhausted, but continuous as the lights fade to black. Their bodies end as hypersexualized, irrevocably gendered, and tirelessly working while going nowhere.

This narrative of a decline into hysteria is explained through what I took to be the central message of the piece; women face a crisis of identity because of societal pressures, expectations, and stereotypes related to the female gender. Midway through the piece, the women boldly interact with the audience in a dialogue about how they see themselves. It ends when they come to the conclusion that “I am what I think you think I am”, throwing in our faces the implications of their agency within knowingly being watched. This phrase is repeated, with the intonation constantly varied, until the meaning is lost as a soundscape accompanied by movement sweeps the women away.

Juxtapose is one of the most well constructed pieces of physical theatre that I have ever seen, with Moisio using repetition and a sort of bastardization of both text and movement to successfully create a fabric of interwoven and reoccurring themes, images, and narratives. It could be argued that this is so successful that sometimes the points presented by the actresses seem heavy-handed or didactic ─ but all of the what seems like obviousness becomes justified by the final sign Moisio thrusts at the audience: “I CAN’T BELIEVE I STILL HAVE TO PROTEST FOR THIS SHIT”. This sign resonates well as the world reacts to the aftermath of the events at Köln on New Year’s Eve, and the subsequent dialogue about the female body that those events stimulated.

My only qualm for this piece is that it comes across as being very generational. I felt my relationship to my femininity as a 20-year-old member of Generation Z to be different from those presented to me by the two members of Generation X or Y on stage. It was very much an exploration of the experience of white women of acertain age. Not that it should have been anything else as that is who had created the piece, but it did add a slight level of removal to some of the female members of the audience who might otherwise be giggling madly, fighting the urge to run up and join these women in the occupation of a space that has been gendered female (read: me). Moisio and Sitarz unabashedly deal with the sexualization and fetishization of the female body head-on, with their mastery over the physical capabilities of their bodies blatantly apparent as they manoeuvre between quaint controlled choreography and pieces where they throw themselves across the room.

The often essentialist representation of femininity that appears within movement-based pieces (due to the focus on the body) was avoided by Juxtapose on account of its venture into the realm of the grotesque or abject ─ something I hope more female dancers/movers/shakers will explore whole-heartedly in the future. As Mary Russo outlines in her book The Female Grotesque; the importance in ability for women to occupy space lies in the fact that “what [she] gains in the way of freedom is the ability to occupy space, ‘transforming herself from pawn to queen…and henceforth goes wherever she pleases on the chessboard’.

The embracing of the grotesque in this piece makes the show reminiscent in feel to the explosive, militant feminist creation of the 90s that we all read and think longingly about. I can’t stress enough on how incredibly powerful and unique this piece is within recent feminist creation. The agency that these women give themselves is militant, unapologetic, and so incredibly empowering to watch. I look forward to seeing what other work they create, and what other work by other companies is inspired by this piece.

16.1. 2016 Nicoletta Dini- The Signal (Halifax, Canada)

Choreographer offers a ‘punch in the gut’ to gender norms – Theatre production Juxtapose evaluates the progress of feminism

Finnish-born Cecilia Moisio twists a straightening iron around her blonde hair like a fork in spaghetti.

“You always have to conform to this certain kind of idea of what people have of you,” the dancer said as she looked in the mirror. “If you’re a blonde woman, you feel that judgment from men around you: ‘You’re a young, blonde woman; what do you have to say?’”

Later on stage, in a ‘50s-style floral dress, white gloves, and a smile, Moisio holds up a sign reading, “Brunettes are fun too.”

This is one of the themes in Juxtapose, a theatre production choreographed by Moisio, featuring fellow performer Erin Harty. With 30-plus years of theatre and dance training experience, the pair have toured their show all over Europe, including France and Austria, and in the United States. Halifax is their first Canadian stop.

Live Art Dance, the organisation presenting the performance describes the event as a satirical and raw “punch in the gut” to established beauty myths and gender norms. Its Facebook post states that Moisio “is not afraid to challenge the status quo.”

“We kind of deconstruct that, break the cliches up and go into destruction,” said Moisio. “It’s something I use in all my pieces, a kind of exhaustion, a very emotional way of dealing with all those topics because they’re very personal for me.”

Moisio says that as a masculine and energetic performer, people have always assumed she’s tough — or a bitch.

“I was always like, ‘OK, that’s fine. That is a part of me but it’s not everything I am.’ It started to irritate me; why can’t you be just what you are?”

Moisio says Western women sometimes take their rights for granted “because we have it good here.”

She hopes to remind them of the struggles women still face, saying, “You see now again in Germany, there were a lot of attacks on women. A woman’s body should be a woman’s own right.”

As a feminist commentary, Moisio’s work confronts subjects ranging from traditional female roles, to feminist stereotypes to the early sexualization of girls.

“Young girls nowadays have it even harder than my generation,” she says. “ We can’t forget these young girls,” she adds, saying they often aren’t educated about the history of the ‘70s feminist movement.

But she doesn’t only want to reach young women.

“I wasn’t really busy thinking about the gender, like, ‘what is the woman?’ It was more just the human fighting to be seen, fighting to just be accepted the way you are. That applies to everyone.”

Moisio hopes that Juxtapose will challenge its audience to look in the mirror and ask tough questions.

“Feminism is just equality. It’s become kind of a dirty word, that you’re difficult and burning bras and man-haters. But I don’t think that’s what it is, I think it’s something we have to keep talking about.”

Interview in The Coast, Halifax, Canada 14.1.2016 ‘Juxtapose is a performance to smash the patriarchy’

Painted toe nails, constricted waists by corsets, white gloves and hats topped of with veils. The dancers Cecilia Moisio and Erin Harty open the new duet Juxtapose as two graceful singers from the 50’s. With their red and pouty lips they sing the hit song Two Little Girls From Little Rock by Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russel from 1953.

Later this song will be play-backed till it becomes a nuisance to rub it in how much a movie hit like that is the culprit for unreachable roll-models that women have to live up to. Preferably –according to the performers- women have to be sexy, blonde, naïve lust objects but also strong, smart, manly, enterprising and street-smart at the same time. And even kitchen goddesses if in anyway possible. An impossible and contradictory task that a lot of women trick with. It’s these forced upon images that the duo in Juxtapose fights fiercely against. Moisio herself danced after her studies at the Theatreschool of Amsterdam a long time at Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel and after with Ann Van den Broek. There she learned to push her muscled body to the limits.

Now she steadily develops herself as choreographer under the roof of production-house Dansmakers Amsterdam. And even if her theme’s and movement style are somehow an extension of her mentor Ann Van den Broek – her blunt approach to the flesh of women- Moisio is surely someone to keep an eye on: she mixes hard performance with happy musical acts and physical feat with sarcastic self-deprecation.

In Juxtapose, together with her strong counterpart Harty, she comments upon the female image itself. The ladies combine a sexy striptease with playfully mixing flour and eggs in a bowl. They parade around in double meanings: they eat a banana, zip milk and dangle the eggs at the height of their uterus.

But they also comment on protesting against these issues. During their change of dresses and girdles into loose black t-shirts they wander about the stage with protest signs with miserable slogans such as ‘Women have souls too!’ The 70’s have had little effect they want to say. The duo makes sharp switches from sugary performance to harsh falling and getting up like trial and error.

They stand in firing position. Moisio and Harty constantly throw mischievous accusations at the audience combined with a feeling for show. They do not (yet) dear to have real interaction with the audience though. Before someone dears to answer they already keep going with their covering fire against perfection. Juxtapose shows how women are being ruled by ideal images. But how can we escape from these?

29.9.2013 Keskisuomalinen – Maija-Liisa Westman

Who’s gaze dictates who I am?

Imagine on stage two Marilyn Monroe’s, one blond, the other brunette. These female beauties are like straight from a Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer Hollywood movie from decades ago with their perfectly color-matched outfits, utterly female behavior, seamed stockings and high-healed shoes. And to top this off the girls burst into singing ‘Little Rock’ about two girls who were determined to school themselves into finding their place under the sun –or did they after all?

As a choreographer Cecilia Moisio is inimitable and in her own class. Juxtapose has the same atmosphere as her earlier work Hi! My Name Is… that was also already seen in Finland. Moisio plays lightly with different theater forms, poses questions and brakes boundaries. Because weather the performance is dance, theatre or circus or if it’s revue, slapstick or performance art, makes no difference. To me it’s all of these and more: Juxtapose is simply a high quality performance and it’s performers strikingly talented.

Cecilia Moisio and Erin Harty work together seamlessly. It’s like looking at a collage or into a kaleidoscope, in which the shards of glass slowly reveal a clear and recognizable picture. And when you shake it, the point of view changes.

Even though it’s light beginning Juxtapose is nothing but a light show from two funny girls. Bit by bit, the garments that seem to be guiding their outside behavior and their perspective come off and simultaneously the loaded message of Juxtapose unravels. Who am I? Do I only exist in through the eyes of others? Who’s gaze actually dictates who I am?

It is 60 years after the publishing of Simone de Beauvoir’s classic work The Second Sex but even today women have to question their right to exist as bare, hideous or fat. Without ornaments or masks. If half of humanity form their self-image through a male mirror, the market- and power forces have nothing to worry about.

Cecilia Moisio asks questions and startles. She is not satisfied with stereotypical esthetic forms but dares to reveal the under laying uncertainty, rage and misery. No wonder she is nominated in the Netherlands as the upcoming choreographer of the year especially because of her work with Juxtapose. We hear the results next week.

IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME

Theaternetwerk- Jolande Kraaijeveld

‘Krisztina’s Keuze’ is the name for a dance program where choreographer Krisztina de Châtel invites five choreographers to make new work. She does this to give these choreographers a chance to further develop themselves in their work. After thirty years of leading her own company Dansgroep Krisztina de Châtel she now brings out productions under the name of De Châtel sur Place. In this first edition she gives the opportunity to choreographers Melissa Ellberger, Cecilia Moisio, Eva Susova, Cris Tandy and Kat Válastur.

Cecilia Moisio opens the night with IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME. A ‘movement monologue’ danced by herself about the ending of a love- relationship. Text and movement come together and become intense emotions and lets the public think about the recognizable faces within a brake-up: denial, blame and fidelity. Short and strong put together.’

1.5.2013 De Theaterkrant- Moos van den Broek ****

‘The evening begins with a solo by Cecilia Moisio who is well known in the Dutch dance scene. She once danced in the dance company of de Châtel and not so long ago she scored high with her duet Juxtapose. In IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME she immediately aims high as she does in her other work. She chooses a narrow white catwalk where she continuously moves up and down in her bronze- colored skirt and white T-shirt. Against the back wall we see a microphone in witch she regularly speaks isolated words from her monologue that later are repeated in the soundscape. The solo is an interaction between text and movement. Every time Moisio moves front she gives another reason for breaking up the relationship until she even falls into repetition. The statements go together with the needed self-doubt. A round turn, a fall, elbow or fist movement: the dance illustrates an emotional battlefield.’

2.5.2013 Volkskrant- Anette Embrechts

‘Cecilia Moisio, a former dancer at de Châtel and an absolute choreographic talent, shows in her solo IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME around 137 reasons to brake up a relationship (bad breath, not on the same level, too old, young, too dumb, too boring etc.) when you don’t have the guts to tell the reasons straight to the other persons face and why you don’t love them anymore. She repeatedly steps up and down the white strip in her high heels or bare feet and changes text and the tone in her voice. Moisio carries this out very well.’

Hi! My Name Is…

5.10.2010 Liikekieli.com- Maija-Liisa Westman

The second performance of the evening had a clear home field advantage. All of the performers except the Irish dancer Erin Harty were from Jyväskylä. Cecilia Moisio left in 1997 to Amsterdam to continue her dance studies. After graduating she has mainly been working in the Netherlands. The male trio in the performance have been making music under the name of Urbaanilegenda since 1999.

The performance started innocently. One by one they enter the stage, say ‘hi’ to each other and find their place in a half-circle of chairs. The beautiful blonde opens her mouth and says: ‘Hi! My Name Is Cecilia and I am co-dependent.’

A raging carousel starts to spin. The dancer on the chair confesses to being a ‘shopaholic, alcoholic…’– the list goes on and on. The text parts in the performance as well as sayings written on papers are mostly in English.

I have never been amidst such chaos but a chaos where the slightest detail is thought of and legitimate. On the background you see five screens projecting footage of the five performers and the excruciating and harrowing music makes your heart almost skip a beat.

The perfect image of the five sitting in a half circle fades quickly. The performers run up and down the stage. They greet each other and hit each other on the cheeks. Finally the slapping develops into bumping, pushing, falling – into pain.

The piece asks the viewer painful questions. The message- if you want to search for one- opens up not only by the ripping reality on stage but also through the song lyrics. All three of the men get their solo. They tell us about the difficulty of loving, about how far we are willing to go in order to be near to others. Sometimes the price can be unreasonably high. If you can only obtain closeness by losing your own self, a lot is lost.

The aesthetics of ugliness can touch you as deep as what we find traditionally beautiful, if not even deeper. The piece totally blew me away.

3.11.2010 Tanssi-magazine- Elina Manninen

Dancer-choreographer Cecilia Moisio’s piece Hi! My Name Is… depicted the windings of love-hungry individuals in between jagged privacy and the constant openness created by the social media. The performers Cecilia Moisio, Erin Harty and members of the hip-hop group Urbaanilegenda Jonne Kuusisto, Joni Vanhanen and Ossi Valpio ask the public an themselves: What should I tell about myself and how? How open should and can I be? The piece combines effortlessly everything possible: movement, sound, speech, text and music. The performers were so delicately and strongly present that the performance felt very real. Harty’s physical and verbal monologue, where she goes through ways of introducing yourself from small talk to hysterical openness, is very funny.

But was Hi! My Name Is… a dance performance? Words and music played a big part although the frantic movements of Moisio and Harty were central as well. We must have seen one of the URB Festivals ‘suggestions for urban art of our times’.

6.11.2010 NRC Handelsblad- Francine van der Wiel

‘Hi! My Name Is… from Cecilia Moisio becomes interesting after some cliché monologues in the beginning by Moisio herself (about her co-dependent character) and Erin Harty (who is desperately speed-dating). This is thanks to the natural way of performing of the three musicians of the Finnish band Urbaanilegenda. They are touching with their odd motoric skills. On the monitors on stage we see how the women throw all their inner lives out there for everyone to see via webcam but the real meetings on stage are awkward and fumbling. They systematically deny their real emotions (…) With Hi! My Name is… Moisio has managed to translate her typical steaming energy upon the other performers.’